January 3, 2006

Review: Flava Pods Vanilla Hazelnut Coffee Pods

We recently discovered Flava Pods - a new coffee pod maker with a bunch of flavored coffee pod flavors for your Senseo, Krups KP1010 Home Cafe, Bunn My Cafe, and other single serve coffee brewers. Flava Pods come individually wrapped and weigh in at 10 grams per pod.

We decided to focus our first Flava Pod coffee pod review on their Vanilla Hazelnut coffee pods. We tend to drink a the more vanilla or hazel flavored coffees and we also like how they mix up with a little cream and sugar.

Other Current Flavors Include:

Cinnamon Sticky Bun

Hawaiian Macadamia Nut

Cinnamon Almond Macaroon

Mocha Cinnamon Swirl

Chocolate Cappuccino

French Vanilla

Supreme Hazelnut Delight

Vanilla Hazelnut

Caramel Nut Crunch

Swiss Chocolate Almond

Flava Pods boasts a a true, robust hazelnut flavor for their vanilla hazelnut coffee pods. What did we think?

We fired up our trusty Bunn My Cafe and decided on the 7 oz setting for testing. We find the best most coffee pods can do is 6.5-7 oz when brewing with the Bunn. We also like to run a good cup of hot water through the brewer to heat it up prior to tasting.

Flava Pods weigh in at 10 grams. This is a good sized coffee pod and has a nice thick feel to it. Flava Pods are packed with nitrogen and we could really sense the freshness when opening the pod.

Upon opening the Flava Pod, we got a nice scent of vanilla hazelnut. Now coffee nose and scent can be misleading. Sometimes a great smelling coffee pod can turn out to brew a very weak cup of coffee. Sometimes the brewed cup of coffee can have an even stronger scent but still produce weak coffee. So we are always a bit cautious with the scent as a big indicator of the type of coffee we may encounter in the end.

After brewing up a 7 oz cup of Vanilla Hazelnut from the Flava Pod coffee pod we like to add a little 2% milk and a teaspoon of sugar in the raw. We of course used our new Pavina double walled glass to sample the coffee in. We highly recommend a clear coffee mug when tasting. You can get a very "clear" read on how dark the coffee is and how your mix of milk goes over in the coffee.

The flavor of the Flava Pods Vanilla Hazelnut is subtle. This is not a knock your socks off with flavor cup of vanilla hazelnut, but does have a very good taste. We did sample some of the other flavors from Flava Pods and found them to also be more subtle than over the top. We do like the Flava Pods Vanilla Hazelnut coffee and think it has a very nice finish and also as the coffee cools maintains a nice flavor.

What we really like is the lack of any bitter bite. We really don't like a flavored coffee that in the end is also too dark and has an acid like finish. The Flava Pods Vanilla Hazelnut is much better with cream and sugar as well and we often find flavored coffees better with cream and sugar.

Overall we're going to give Flava Pods Vanilla Hazelnut a 3.5 out of 5 coffee pods. The smooth vanilla hazelnut flavor is very good and the freshness of the coffee produced is excellent.

You may want to try Flava Pods for yourself as they have a sampler pack available. We find the sampler pack of any pod etailer to be the best way to get an idea of what you'd like to order in any quantity.

Thanks again to Flava Pods for sending in the sample coffee pods to review.

Jim: I purchased a opus coffee maker and liked the sample read moreStephanie: I would like to know why grocery stores do not read moreNancy: I want to buy this lid read moreXelleld: I don't think they sell it nationwide. It only seems read moreBatman: I agree! The Junior Mints K cup is the best read more